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If this means that TomH's idea will ever get around to being seriously discussed, the discussion should include a review of the RM5 "Full GEDCOM 5.5 support so you can exchange data with other programs" marketing claim. In addition to being an available RM4 feature, linking to a given external media file from multiple INDI, FAM, SOUR, etc. GEDCOM records, with distinct TITL and/or NOTE sub-records, is GEDCOM 5.5 standard compliant. But RM5 does not preserve such logical record organization, and even more troubling, in some cases, it effectively replaces such logical record constructs with an alternative which may be, and in lots of my own cases most definitely is, incorrect/misleading.

This admits multiple INDI, SOUR, FAM, etc. records linked to the same file, with distinct TITL and NOTE subordinate records, as is permitted in RM4. But RM5 does not preserve the distinct subordinate records. In particular, the TITL sub-records, which RM4 uses as media captions, are not preserved. RM5 effectively replaces all such multiple occurrences with one of them, presumably the first encountered on database upgrade/GEDCOM import. In either case, a subsequent RM5 export to GEDCOM has a logical record structure which does not preserve that of the standard compliant RM4 generated inpuut GEDCOM.

When you enter a new piece of media into the media gallery you are able to define it's caption. To me this is similar to the Master Source and how you name the Master source in the Source List. Each time you link to the media in the database you create a tag and you can add your own description to that tag. Similar to how you can use a Master Source and create detail citations to it. The title to the Master Source stays with all references to it - just like the caption stays with all the media tags.

When you converted from RM4 to RM5 it used the first link to that image in the media gallery to create a caption. You can go under Properties to change that caption to something more universal.

For 3000+ sources? I don't think that will work for me.

I used a completely legitimate RM4 media gallery/source linking feature (actually I have used it since RM3) and naively purchased RM5 (which uses a very similar SQLite database to that in RM4) assuming that elementary things like the media linking features are compatible. I am very annoyed.

We had many users request that an image have one caption in the file, this is the reason for the redesign. When you edit a tag you will see it has a comment section that goes with that individual tag. This is where you can make custom descriptions.

Tagging of shared events does have an enhancement request to include the names of sharees in our tracking system.

So why is the 'Caption' field retained in the MediaLinkTable if it is not used?

This is a show stopper for me. I have over 3000 census sources, with linked census schedule and form media, and they are set up so that the census schedule media item shows up in RM4 with an appropriately descriptive caption, which is stored in the MediaLinkTable caption field. Now in RM5, the caption for the first occurrence, i.e. the first source linked to the census schedule media item, gets transferred to the MediaTable caption field and subsequent occurrences have their captions transferred to the MediaLinkTable record's 'Description' field. All sources linked to the media item display the caption from the first occurrence, i.e. the caption transferred to the MediaTable matching the first source linked to the media item. I have to find a workaround for this or discard RM5.